<p>Research on ethical leadership behavior continues to flourish in the twenty-first century, yet previous studies often conflate leaders' ethical behaviors with motives. We propose that subordinates respond differently to ethical leadership behaviors (in terms of showing OCB) based on how they perceive ethical leadership motives. We conducted five complementary studies. In the first three studies, we applied grounded research and semi-structured interviews to develop a 9-item attribution of ethical leadership motives scale (AELMS), including altruistic and instrumental motives. Study 4 explores how subordinates' attribution of ethical leadership motives constrains the effect of leadership behavior on OCB. Study 5 is a vignette experiment to provide evidence of causality. The results across these studies showed that (a) attribution of altruistic motives positively moderated the relationship between ethical leadership and subordinates' OCB, and (b) attribution of instrumental motives did not impede the effect of ethical leadership behaviors. Interestingly, instrumental motives strengthened the positive link between ethical leadership and OCB when altruism was also present. These findings expand our understanding of ethical leadership from a subordinate perspective and offer insight into engaging in ethical leadership wisely.</p>